By the early 15th century, artists in Italy were becoming increasingly aware that, while Rome had once been the centre of the Western world, its power and prestige had steadily declined since the invading Germanic tribes broke up the empire. The belief that art, science, and scholarship had flourished during the classical Classical period stimulated the desire for a revival of the values of that period. Both architecture and painting found new inspiration in Greek and Roman models, and the discovery of perspective in painting and drawing added new possibilities, which in turn were to have a profound effect on stage scenery. At the same timeclassical , Classical literature was reexamined: new texts were found and old ones edited. The capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 resulted in an exodus of Greek scholars to Italy, and they brought with them their knowledge of Greek literature.

The invention in Europe of the printing press made the new learning more widely accessible and revolutionized the whole educational system. Increased commerce encouraged exploration, and the discovery “discovery” of the Americas by Columbus in 1492 brought about a new world outlookon the world. Whereas learning had traditionally been sought in the seclusion of monasteries, the new learning of the Renaissance was more widespread and dynamic. Scholars were not satisfied with merely understanding the ideals of antiquity; they wanted to re-create them. This also gave man new dignity and confidence. The world was regarded not as something to be overcome in order to have a life in the next world , but as something to be enjoyed. The spirit of the Renaissance was epitomized in the words of the Greek philosopher Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things.” Even though this humanist view sometimes clashed with Christian doctrines, the papacy reached, if somewhat reluctantly, a modus vivendi with the new learning. Indeed, the Vatican Library amassed works of classical Classical culture from all over the Christian world. The popes and the wealthy families of Italy became patrons of the arts, gathering scholars and artists in their courts.

The Renaissance stage

The printed Latin texts of Terence, Plautus, and Seneca were widely read after the development of the printing press. By the end of the 15th century attempts were made to stage their works, first in Rome, sponsored by Pomponius Laetus, and then in Ferrara. At first the stages resembled classicized Classicized versions of the mansions used for mystery plays, though compressed onto a single raised stage with curtained entrances between pillars to represent various houses. Later efforts concentrated on re-creating the form of the classical Classical stage inside large halls.

One of the greatest influences on the development of theatre buildings in the Renaissance was the discovery in 1414 of De architecturaof Vitruvius, a Roman architect of (On Architecture), written by the 1st-century Roman architect Vitruvius. This 10-volume treatise contained valuable information on the scenery used for classical Classical tragedy, comedy, and satyr plays (farces), along with detailed descriptions of the Roman theatre, with its auditorium, orchestra, and stage backed by the scaenae frons. Vitruvius’ Vitruvius’s work, translated and published all over Europe, was provided with woodcuts showing ground plans and front elevations of classical Classical stages. Various reconstructions of the Roman theatre were built, culminating in the beautiful Teatro Olimpico at Vicenza, designed by the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio and completed in 1585 by Vincenzo Scamozzi. It is Europe’s oldest surviving indoor theatre. Palladio had created a magnificent scaenae frons, but Scamozzi added three-dimensional perspective vistas of street scenes receding behind the archways. It was this preoccupation with perspective that characterized future developments of the Renaissance stage and indeed the modern theatre, though the effects were usually achieved through painted backdrops and wings. Sebastiano Serlio’s influential Second livre de la perspective (1545; The Second Book of Architecture), generally referred to as “Architettura,” outlined three basic stage settings, suggesting an impressive arrangement of palaces and temples for tragedy, complex street scenes for comedy, and idealized landscapes with trees and cottages for pastoral plays.

Major theatrical styles, tendencies, and forms

Italian Neoclassicism

Ironically, while While all the innovations seemed to originate in Italy and then spread through Europe, the plays that were first performed on the new stages in Italy were extremely dull. Far from liberating the creative mind, the classical Classical ideals had only constricted it. Partly to blame was the adoption of the so-called Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action, which became, in the hands of theorists, a set of rules so rigid that they strangled drama by forcing it into a framework where the action had to take place in a single location in the space of a single day. At a time of expansion and change, such rules only created a disharmony between form and content and between the stage and the play. A further reason was that this theatre took place inside the palaces of isolated and parochial cities in the presence of a privileged elite. Cut off from the public, lifeless tragedies and limp comedies resorted to philosophical discourse as a substitute for the passion that was meanwhile animating the theatre in England and Spain.

Significantly, the bawdy comedies of Plautus provided inspiration for two of the most interesting dramatists of the Italian Renaissance in the early 16th century. Ludovico Ariosto, a poet at the court of Ferrara, was the first to break away from the strict imitation of classical Classical models and produce a truly Italian flavour in his work. The second figure was Ruzzante (the stage name of Angelo Beolco), who acted in his own farces about rustic life written in the Paduan dialect. Through his use of everyday situations and distinctly Italian character types, Ruzzante introduced a more natural style of acting, drawn from life and observation of people.

As a relief from the severity of classical Classical plays, intermezziwere introduced between the acts as lighthearted and spectacular diversions, usually dealing with mythological subjects. These rapidly became more popular than the plays themselves and were often performed as independent entertainments at weddings and banquets in the courts of Italian princes. As the scenic aspects of the intermezzigrew more elaborate, changeable scenery was developed, as was complicated machinery with which to mobilize clouds, waves, and sea monsters. Five basic settings were established: heaven, hell, the countryside, the sea, and a city street or square.

Courtly entertainments

During the 15th and 16th centuries, some of Italy’s finest painters and musicians were employed to organize entertainments at court. Leonardo da Vinci, who designed a revolving stage in 1490 (it was never built, however), arranged the settings, masks, and costumes of Festa del Paradiso, an entertainment given during the wedding celebrations for Lodovico Sforza, duke of Milan. Raphael also painted much admired stage settings. Equestrian ballets and triumphal processions were a spectacular feature requiring careful preparation, and they became the highlight of these displays of power and wealth. Princes, dukes, and monarchs were invited to such festivals and rode on horseback or in ornate carriages in processions of allegorical floats. Sometimes their entrances were choreographed as they passed under specially constructed triumphal arches or towers and open stages with tableaux vivants. In France the entrées solennelles—entrance processions of great pomposity—were developed to a peak of elaborate ceremonial display. Aquatic pageantry also became popular in the 17th century, with the monarch surrounded by a collection of ornate barges, sea monsters, scallop shells, and ships.

A popular new genre among the Italian nobility in the latter half of the 16th century was the pastoral. It was a sophisticated form of entertainment dramatizing classical Classical themes in the romantic but highly artificial setting of an Arcadian landscape peopled with gentle nymphs, shepherds, magicians, and satyrs.

Opera

One of the most enduring products of the Renaissance theatre was the opera. It grew out of experiments by the Florentine Camerata Camerata, a Florentine society of poets and musicians that at the end of the 16th century sought to revive Greek tragedy. The men who formed the Florentine Camerata believed that the Greeks had originally recited or chanted their plays to music, and in setting out to recreate these conditions, the Camerata used music to heighten the poetic qualities of the dialogue. Heavily influenced by the intermezzithat were currently in fashion, the first attempts were on mythological subjects (Daphne, Orpheus, etc.). The opera was an immediate success. The novelty impact of the music meant that the libretto diminished in importance. By 1607 Claudio Monteverdi had composed his masterpiece, Orfeo, which placed the emphasis squarely on music and established the basic form that European opera was to take for the next 300 years.

At first, opera was performed on special occasions intended to display the patron’s status and wealth; thus it was politically important. Great care was lavished on the visual aspects of the opera, and the librettos gave ample opportunities for scene painters and stage engineers to exploit their new mastery of perspective. As the scenery became more opulent, so the shape of the theatre was altered to accommodate it. The proscenium arch was developed to frame the setting and facilitate changes of scenery, while the auditorium was extended to a horseshoe shape. The earliest example of this type of theatre was the Teatro Farnese in Parma (1618–28), the prototype of the modern opera house. From its exclusive beginnings, the appeal of opera broadened, and in 1637 the first opera house was opened to the general public in Venice. By this time, the form had also caught on in Vienna.

Commedia dell’arte

Around the mid-16th century, there emerged in Italy a lively tradition of popular theatre that fused many disparate elements into a vigorous style, which profoundly influenced the development of European theatre. This was the legendary commedia dell’arte (“theatre of the professionals”), a nonliterary tradition that centred on the actor, as distinguished from the commedia erudita, where the writer was preeminent. Although the precise origins of the commedia dell’arte are difficult to establish, its many similarities with the skills of the medieval jongleurs, who were themselves descendants of the Roman mimes, suggest that it may have been a reawakening of the fabula Atellana, stimulated and coloured by social conditions in Italy during the Renaissance.

In spite of its outwardly anarchic spirit, the commedia dell’arte was a highly disciplined art requiring both virtuosity and a strong sense of ensemble playing. Its special quality came from improvisation. Working from a scenario that outlined the plot, the actors would improvise their own dialogue, striving for a balance of words and actions. Acrobatics and singing were also used, as well as the lazzi (special rehearsed routines that could be inserted into the plays at convenient points to heighten the comedy). Because the actors stayed together in permanent companies and specialized in playing the same role for most of their professional lives, they achieved a degree of mastery that had been hitherto unknown on the Italian stage and that must have made the rest of the theatre seem all the more artificial. Another reason for the impact of the commedia dell’arte was that it heralded the first appearance in Italy of professional actresses (the best known being Isabella Andreini), though the female characters were never as sharply developed as their male counterparts. Most of the characters were defined by the leather half-masks they wore (another link with the theatre of antiquity), which made them instantly recognizable. They also spoke in the dialect of their different provinces. Characters such as Pantalone, the miserly Venetian merchant; Dottore Gratiano, the pedant from Bologna; or Arlecchino, the mischievous servant from Bergamo, began as satires on Italian “types” and became the archetypes of many of the favourite characters of 17th- and 18th-century European theatre.

From humble beginnings, setting up their stages in city squares, the better troupes—notably Gelosi, Confidenti, and Fedeli—performed in palaces and became internationally famous once they traveled abroad. The commedia dell’arte swept through Europe. It was particularly popular in France, where resident Italian troupes were established before the end of the 16th century. Local variations on the characters appeared in the 17th century. The cheeky servant Pedrolino became the melancholy Pierrot in France, while Pulcinella became Punch in England and Hanswurst and, in turn, Kasperle in Austria and Germany. By the 18th century the commedia dell’arte was a lost art, though its spirit lived on through the work of the dramatists it inspired, among whom were including Molière (stage name of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), Carlo Goldoni, and William Shakespeare.

Jesuit theatre and school drama

A reflection of the humanist tradition in Europe was the emergence of the school drama in the second half of the 16th century . This was of the school drama, an amateur movement in which Latin plays were performed as part of the curriculum. Soon after the Society of Jesus was founded in 1540 to combat the heresies “heresies” of the Reformation, it was realized that theatre could be an excellent means of glorifying the Roman Catholic Church church and showing the evils of free thought. Consequently, the school play became an important activity in the Jesuit colleges that were established all over the Continent. While retaining both the language and techniques of the classical Classical writers, the Jesuit dramatists turned to biblical themes and the lives of the saints and martyrs for their subject matter. Since part of the educational purpose of this type of drama was to teach pupils how to behave and express themselves in accordance with the requirements of the upper classes, tragedies were preferred to comedies, because the latter were considered unsuitable in their levity and crudeness. In spite of its severity of tone, the Jesuit theatre flourished in the 16th and 17th centuries by adapting to local customs and turning the latest theatrical innovations to its own use. Thus music and singing were incorporated in into the plays, which were eventually expanded to include some of the elaborate scenic effects used in contemporary opera. The Jesuit theatre produced no plays of lasting consequence, yet princes took part in its college performances and Roman Catholic emperors attended them. Also, some of the most important dramatists of the European theatre, including Pierre Corneille, Molière, and Goldoni, were educated in Jesuit schools and may have been influenced by their theatrical activities.

Although the movement did not reach England for politico-religious reasons, school plays accounted for the first secular comedies in English during the first half of the 16th century—namely, Ralph Roister Doister and Gammer Gurton’s Needle. And, in 1560, Elizabeth I decreed that the scholars of Westminster School should perform a Latin play every Christmas. This practice has endured until the present day, making it perhaps the longest continuous continual acting tradition in Europe.

Spain’s Golden Age

Because the Reformation, which divided Europe in the early 16th century, had not affected Spain, the long tradition of religious drama continued there throughout the Renaissance in the form of autos sacramentales. Usually one-act allegories, these plays were performed as part of the Corpus Christi celebrations in which the king participated. As the prudent Spanish clergy had purged religious drama of those elements that laid it open to ridicule in other European countries, autos became a serious art form cultivated by some of the finest poets of the Spanish Golden Age.

The vigour of the secular theatre was offset by a lack of permanent playhouses. In the early 16th century, the first professional companies, like such as that of Lope de Rueda, had to travel about as strolling players, carrying their own equipment with them. They were so poor that, in the words of Cervantes, “their whole baggage would go into a single sack.” Lope de Rueda was noted for the lively use of colloquial speech in his short comic sketches known as pasos. These were performed between the acts of more serious dramas. Plays were sometimes presented in palace halls, but most often they were performed in corrales, where an improvised stage was set up at one end of the square formed by the walls of adjoining houses.

When the first permanent theatres were built, they were not patterned on the Italian model, but rather they incorporated features of the corrale. The audience stood in a rectangular courtyard (patio) or sat in galleries, with the women having to sit apart in a special gallery of their own. The stage stretched across one end of the square with an inner stage at the back. Very little scenery was used, though there were trapdoors in the floor and machinery above for “flying” people or objects. The theatre was open to the sky, but an awning could be drawn over the audience to provide protection against sunlight and rain. It was a stage well adapted for rhetoric and poetry, where the imagination of the audience could be stimulated. Furthermore, it was a theatre for all social classes. By the end of the 16th century, permanent theatres were established in Sevilla (Seville), Valencia, and Madrid, where two of the first were the Corral de la Cruz (1579) and the Corral del Príncipe (1582). In addition to the main play, programs included short comic sketches, musical interludes, ballads, and dances.

The strength of the Spanish theatre of the Golden Age was that, while embracing some of the Italian innovations in staging and acting (commedia dell’arte troupes exerted a strong influence in Spain from 1574), it was never restrained by the rules of Classicism. Instead, it developed a robust national style that was passionate, romantic, and lyrical and that could weave together comedy and tragedy in a way that was never possible in Italy or France. This style found rich expression in the work of Lope de Vega. His prodigious output of more than 1,000 plays, about 400 of which survive, gives an idea of the audience’s insatiable demand for new works. Drawing on a wide variety of materials for tragedies, comedies, pastorals, histories, and the distinctly Spanish genre of comedias de capa y espada (the cloak-and-dagger plays)sword drama, Lope portrayed a rigid society divided into three estates: the king, the nobles, and the common people. Entertainment was his first concern, and his depiction of peasant characters, both comic and tragic, was particularly vivid.

In the first half of the 17th century the Baroque style of theatre, with its elaborate scenery and stage machinery, was used to great advantage by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Attached to the Spanish court, he was not under as much pressure as Lope to be prolifically inventive, yet he wrote nearly 200 plays. While lacking the sheer vigour of Lope’s works, Calderón’s plays are more refined and philosophical, even though many of his characters appear to be rigidly bound by the idea of the pundonor (“point of honour”). In later life, Calderón wrote many fine autos sacramentales and other plays on religious themes. The idea that “all the world is a stage” was expressed in El gran teatro del mundo (c. 1635; The Great Theatre of the World) through the hierarchical concept that every man plays his part before God. This theme was also reflected in Calderón’s finest play, La vida es sueño (1635; Life Is a Dream).

Elizabethan and Jacobean English theatre

In England the influence of the Italian Renaissance was weaker, but the theatre of the Elizabethan Age was all the stronger for it. Apart from the rediscovery of classical Classical culture, the 16th century in England was a time for developing a new sense of national identity, necessitated by the establishment of a national church. Furthermore, because the English were more suspicious of Rome and the Latin tradition, there was less imitation of classical Classical dramatic forms and an almost complete disregard for the rules that bound the theatre in France and Italy. England built on its own foundations by adapting the strong native tradition of medieval religious drama to serve a more secular purpose. When some of the continental Continental innovations were blended with this cruder indigenous strain, a rich synthesis was produced. Consequently, the theatre that emerged was resonant, varied, and in touch with all segments of society. It included the high seriousness of morality plays, the sweep of chronicle histories, the fantasy of romantic comedies, and the irreverent fun of the interludes.

At the same time, the English theatre had to contend with severe restrictions. The suppression of the festival of Corpus Christi in 1548 as a means of reinforcing the Protestant Church church marked the rapid decline of morality plays and mystery cycles. Their forced descent into satirical propaganda mocking the Catholic faith polarized the audience and led to riots. By 1590 , playwrights were prohibited from dramatizing religious issues and had to resort to history, mythology, allegory, or allusion in order to say anything about contemporary society. Flouting ; flouting these restrictions meant imprisonment. Nevertheless, playwrights managed to argue highly explosive political topics. In William Shakespeare’s histories, for instance, the subject of kingship is thoroughly examined in all its implications: both the rightful but incompetent sovereign and the usurping but strong monarch are scrutinized—a most daring undertaking during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603). The situation for actors was not helped by the hostile attitude of the City of London authorities, who regarded theatre as an immoral pastime to be discouraged rather than tolerated. Professional companies, however, were invited to perform at court from the beginning of the 16th century (though on a smaller scale than on the Continent), and public performances took place wherever a suitable space could be found—in large rooms of inns, in halls, or in quiet innyards enclosed on all sides with a temporary platform stage around which spectators could gather while others looked out from the windows above. But such makeshift conditions only retarded stalled the development of the drama and kept it on an amateurish level.

The Elizabethan theatre

These conditions were improved considerably improved during Elizabeth’s reignby the legitimizing , when, in 1574of , regular weekday performances were legitimized and the building of the first playhouse in 1576 when, in 1576, the first playhouse was built, by James Burbage. Called simply the Theatre, it was erected in London immediately outside the City city boundary. Others followed, including the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, and the Globe, where most of Shakespeare’s plays were first staged. Just as the Spanish playhouse reproduced the features of the corrale it had grown out of, so the Elizabethan playhouse followed the pattern of the improvised innyard theatre. It was an enclosed circular structure containing two or three galleries with benches or stoolsand had . Spectators could also stand in an unroofed space in the middle where spectators could stand on three sides of the raised platform stage, which extended into the middle of the theatre. Behind the stage was a wall with curtained doors and, above this, an actors’ and musicians’ gallery. Large numbers of people could be accommodated, and the price was kept low at between one penny and sixpence. This type of stage allowed for fluid movement and considerable intimacy between actors and audience, while its lack of scenery placed the emphasis firmly on the actor interpreting the playwright’s words. Such sheer simplicity presented a superb challenge for the writer: the quality of both language and acting had to be good enough to hold the attention of the spectators and make them use their imaginations.

This challenge was quickly taken up by a generation of playwrights who could carry forward the established dramatic forms and test the possibilities of the new stage. Christopher Marlowe was the major innovator, developing a vigorous style of tragedy that was refined by his contemporary, William Shakespeare, who began writing for the theatre about 1590. At this time, professional companies operated under the patronage of a member of the nobility. In Shakespeare’s company, known as the Chamberlain’s Men (later renamed the King’s Men), the actors owned their playhouse, prompt books, costumes, and properties, and they shared in the profits. Other companies paid rent to the patronand received salaries from him, who paid their salaries. There were very few rehearsals for a new play, and because the texts were not immediately printed (to avoid pirating by rival companies) each actor was usually given only his own lines, with the relevant cues, in manuscript form. No women appeared on the Elizabethan stage; female roles were taken either by boy actors or, in the case of older women, by adult male comedians. As in Italy, all the actors had to be able to sing and dance and often to make generate their own music. The great actors of the day were Richard Burbage, who worked in Shakespeare’s company, and Edward Alleyn, who was mainly associated with Ben Jonson. In spite of the fact that theatres such as the Globe played to a cross section of London’s populace, audiences seem to have been attentive and well behaved.

An alternative to the outdoor public playhouse was the private indoor theatre. The first of these was an abandoned monastery near St. Paul’s Cathedral, converted in 1576 by Richard Farrant and renamed the Blackfriars Theatre. Others included the Cockpit, the Salisbury Court, and the Whitefriars. Initially these theatres were closer to the Spanish model, with the a bare stage across one end, an inner stage at the back, benches in front for the audience, and galleries all around. Later, they made use of more elaborate scenery and featured the Italian-style proscenium arch. Because of the reduced size of the audience in such a setup, higher prices had to be charged, which excluded all but the more wealthy and learned segment of the public. This in turn affected the style of writing; these private theatres were mostly used by boy companies that presented a more refined and artificial type of drama. One of their chief dramatists was John Lyly, though Ben Jonson wrote many of his plays for them. Growing rivalry between the boy and adult companies, exacerbated by hostility from the increasingly powerful Puritan movement, resulted in James I imposing even tighter controls and exercising heavy censorship on the theatre when he came to the throne in 1603.

Jacobean theatre

Although the Italian influence gradually became stronger in the early part of the 17th century, the English theatre was by then established and confident enough to take over foreign ideas without losing any of its individuality. Jonson became increasingly preoccupied with the dramatic unities, while other writers of the Jacobean period such as John Webster, Thomas Middleton, and John Ford favoured a more definite separation of comedy and tragedy than had been the case in Elizabethan drama. They were given to sensationalism in their revenge plays, finding inspiration in Spanish cloak-and-sword drama and in the darker moods of Seneca and often setting them their own plays in Italy.

Meanwhile, at court the pastoral was finding new popularity, partly because it provided opportunities for spectacular scenery, and with it came the revival of the masque—a masque—an allegorical entertainment combining poetry, music, dance, scenery, and extravagant costumes. As court poet, Ben Jonson collaborated with the architect and designer Inigo Jones to produce some of the finest examples of the masque. Having spent a few years in Italy, Jones was greatly influenced by the Italian painted scenery and its use of machinery. On his return to England he did much to bring scenic design up to date, introducing many innovations. Members of the court had thorough training in dancing, fencing, singing, instrumental music, and courtly ceremonial. They were therefore well prepared to perform in the masques, even to take solo parts and to appear in the chorus. Masques became even more elaborate under Charles I, but in 1634 Jonson angrily withdrew his contribution when he saw that the visual elements were completely overtaking the dramatic content. When the Civil War broke out in 1642, the Puritans closed all the theatres and forbade public dramatic performances of any kind. This created an almost complete a significant break in the acting tradition for 18 years, until the Restoration of Charles II, after which the theatre flourished once more, though on along quite different lines.

German theatre

While England and Spain were developing their own national styles of theatre, the German-speaking countries lagged well behind, embroiled in constant warfare and religious upheaval and lacking a unifying capital city as a cultural focal point. Classical plays had little more than academic interest, and the tradition remained indigenous albeit crudely medieval. The most notable writer was the Meistersinger Hans Sachs, who transformed the bawdy Fastnachtsspiele into more acceptable farces with which to entertain Shrovetide carnival crowds. He also established Germany’s first theatre building inside a church in Nürnberg in 1550, though there were no truly professional companies to fill it.

An unexpected stimulus came from touring English troupes that had firmly established themselves in Germany by the end of the 16th century. Although there was a good deal of cross-fertilization between England and the Continent, many English actors chose exile as an escape from monopolies, suppression, and the withdrawal of playing licenses at home. They gave public performances in towns or at rural fairs and private ones in the halls of nobles. Robert Browne’s company was the first, arriving in Frankfurt in 1592. In a country where local theatre was weighed down by excessive moralizing, these actors made an immediate impact through their robustness and vivid professionalism. Their repertoire consisted mainly of pirated versions of Elizabethan tragedies and comedies, performed in English, though heavily cut and padded with enough music, dancing, acrobatics, and dumb show to overcome the language barrier. In between the acts a clown figure, combining the English fool and the German Narr (from the Fastnachtsspiel), took over with improvised antics in pidgin English sprinkled with Dutch and German phrases. Thomas Sackville created one of the first of such clown figures in the character Jan Bouschet. Similar English creations were Hans Stockfisch and Pickelherring—prototypes of the totally German character Hanswurst, who found his way into all the improvised comedies of the day. As the proportion of German actors in the English companies increased, a more indigenous drama developed known as Haupt-und-Staatsaktionen. As this term implies, such plays dealt with the intrigues of high characters in high places and abounded with blustering rhetoric and gory sensationalism. The last English troupes left Germany in 1659, by which time the Italian style of staging, with its perspective scenery, had become the fashion in spectacular court operas and the elaborate productions of Jesuit school plays (see above).

Dutch strolling players also visited Germany, performing vertoonige (“living tableaux”) and contemporary plays, especially Spanish dramabeing much favoured. Italian traveling players presented puppet theatre in Austria and southern Germany as an offshoot of the commedia dell’arte, which itself was widely imitated, particularly in Austria. While the strolling players did little to elevate German theatre to the level of the highest art, they did at least establish vital links with neighbouring European cultures, helping to inject new ideas into backward traditions and precipitating the emergence of the professional actor.

French Neoclassicism

Theatre companies in France in the early 16th century were playing a mixed fare of moralities, miracle plays, farces, and soties. The most important company was an amateur guild called the Confrérie de la Passion, which held a monopoly on acting in Paris. In 1548 it opened its own theatre, the Hôtel de Bourgogne, a long narrow room with the stage filling one end, a pit for standing spectators, and two galleries around the walls. Both auditorium and stage were lit by candles. Soon after the theatre opened, the Confrérie was forbidden by decree to perform religious plays for fear that they could be used to debase Roman Catholicism. The feeble traditions of indigenous secular drama in its repertoire were soon overpowered by the Renaissance influence, and dramatists began looking to classical Classical antiquity for inspiration. Civil war, however, halted the appearance of any truly great drama until well into the 17th century. The new plays that appeared in Paris—mainly pastorals and tragicomedies—were written by classical Classical scholars as imitations of the Italian commedia erudita, but the French love of order resulted in the intensification of the dramatic unities of time, place, and action. The first fully professional company, which included women, was that of Valleran-Lecomte; it took over the Hôtel de Bourgogne toward the end of the century, performing its plays on the medieval-style multiple setting stage. The acting in these Neoclassical plays was not given to realism: each actor stood at the front of the stage to declaim his lines and then stepped back to allow the next actor to speak.

National unity came in the early 17th century under Louis XIII and his brilliant adviser, the cardinal de Richelieu, and with unity came the desire (similar to that in Tudor England) to create a strong national culture. Theatre companies were active in the provinces, but Paris, the centre of cultural life, was the goal for which they all aimed. In 1634 the Théâtre du Marais was opened in an indoor tennis court, and in 1641 Richelieu built his own Italian-style theatre (complete with all the latest machinery), which after his death became the Théâtre du Palais-Royal. Richelieu, who took an active interest in theatre, had also tried to purify comedy and tragedy by discouraging what he considered the formless tragicomedy. His efforts, however, were thrown into confusion by the arrival of the first French play of any real worth, Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid (1637), a tragicomedy that ignored the revered unities. Working smoothly within the rules, Corneille’s rival, Jean Racine, took French Neoclassical drama to its greatest heights with his nine tragedies, of which Phèdre (1677) is regarded as the pinnacle.

Both Racine and Corneille were overshadowed by Molière, who is considered the world’s greatest comic dramatist. After 13 years of touring France with his company, the Illustre-Théâtre, Molière was accepted at the court of Louis XIV in 1658 and began to elevate the crude farce to the level of sophisticated social comedy, placing it on a par with tragedy. For several years he shared the Petit-Bourbon theatre with a troupe of commedia dell’arte actors led by Tiberio Fiorillo and was much influenced by their realistic style of playing. Later he moved to the Palais-Royal. Far from imitating foreign plays, Molière created distinctly French characters based on an acute observation of social manners. After Molière’s death, Louis XIV amalgamated the Illustre-Théâtre with two other companies in 1680 to form Europe’s first national theatre, the Comédie-Française, which continues to further the cultural aims of France to the present day.

Spread of national theatres

In the course of the succeeding centuries, national theatres were established in many other European countries but not necessarily for the same reasons. German national theatres fought to shake off the infiltration of French culture and to develop native traditions. It was the aim of the Austrian emperor Joseph II to institute national theatres for all the peoples of his empire so that they might become acquainted with the works of world literature in their own tongue. After establishing a national theatre for the German-speaking population of Austria, Joseph II then supported the Czechs and Slovaks in their efforts toward their own national theatre. Later, one was founded in Budapest for the Hungarians. Gustav II created the Swedish national theatre. Catherine the Great of Russia also set out to introduce her people to the dramatic works of world literature performed in the Russian language.

There was no court theatre in the Netherlands. The performances of plays and the organization of theatre festivals had, since the 15th century, been in the hands of the Rederijkerskamers—societies of amateur enthusiasts similar to the French confréries. The plays—both serious religious pieces and farces—were usually presented outdoors on a raised platform with a curtained facade. The curtain could be closed for scene changes, though the settings themselves were very simple. In 1617 the first Dutch Academy was opened, and one of its priorities was to foster a higher standard of theatre developing at the time under a strong French influence. This eventually led to the construction of the first indoor theatre in Amsterdam, the Schouwburg. It opened with Gysbrecht van Aemstel (1638), a patriotic play in the classical Classical tradition by the Netherlands’ major Dutch poet and dramatist , Joost van den Vondel. The Schouwburg, which had a semipermanent setting, was remodeled in 1665 along Italian lines, though this did nothing to stem the general decline in Dutch drama.

Ballet and opera-ballet

If there was a lack of great theatre in France before Corneille, it was well compensated for by extravagant court ceremonials in which dance featured prominently. These reached a high level of sophistication in the later 16th century, stimulated by the presence of Italian dancing masters invited to the French court by Catherine de Médicis. A product of this collaboration was the ballet comique, a courtly dance entertainment with words. Another Italian import was changeable-perspective scenery, which was brought to Paris in 1645 by the designer Giacomo Torelli, who completely refurbished the Petit-Bourbon. The staging of court ballets was accordingly adapted to show off the possibilities of the new machinery. Louis XIV often took part in these and earned the title Le Roi Soleil (The Sun King) when he performed as the Sun in Le Ballet de la nuit in 1653. Molière was called upon to provide texts for elaborate court festivities at Versailles involving ballets, plays, fireworks displays, and theatrical banquets.

Louis XIV also organized the teaching and presentation of music and dance by setting up academies. The Académie Royal de Musique (1669) was officially given the exclusive right to present operas, which led to a new genre, the opera-ballet, initiated by the composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, which combined vocal scenes with danced interludes. Following the developments in Italian opera, composers made new demands on singers, who had to study for years in order to be able to meet them successfully. After the mid-17th century, singers exerted considerable influence on the structure of new works because they demanded showpiece arias at certain places in the text. The dramatic technique of Baroque opera followed set rules: arias were to be sung at the front of the stage, facing the audience; the chorus was directed as a static body; and the ornate setting was an elaborate decoration with which to please the eye rather than a functional definition of the acting area. One effect of the academies was to transfer dance activities from the court to the professional stage, and in 1681 the first professional dancers appeared in Le Triomphe de l’amour (The Triumph of Love), choreographed by Charles-Louis Beauchamp to Lully’s music.

Restoration theatre

One of the first gestures of Charles II upon his Restoration in 1660 was to reverse Puritan sobriety by encouraging the kind of entertainment and theatrical activities that he had seen during his years of exile at the French court. Within months of his return to London he granted royal patents to Thomas Killigrew and Sir William Davenant to establish two theatre companies, the King’s Players and the Duke’s Players, respectively. Significantly, they chose to follow the French example and convert two indoor tennis courts as temporary premises rather than take over one of the surviving Elizabethan playhouses. In 1671 Sir Christopher Wren built the Duke’s Theatre, Dorset Garden, for Davenant, and three years later he built the first Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, for Killigrew. These theatres combined continental Continental innovations with some of the features of the Elizabethan stage. A curved “apron” stage extended beyond the proscenium arch from which entrance doors opened, indicating that most of the action was played toward the front of the stage with the scenery as a mere background. Stock sets of changeable flats were used, and lighting was provided by candles. The greatest impact, however, came from the introduction of actresses to the English stage, the most famous being Nell Gwyn.

The first productions were reworkings of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, tailored to suit the tastes of the new aristocratic audience composed almost exclusively of courtiers and their attendants. (The majority of the populace, still under the influence of Puritanism, stayed away and probably could not have afforded it anyway.) Values had changed since Shakespeare’s day: the new audience consisted of fashionable young cynics and dilettantes, self-indulgent rakes and wits who prized glittering conversation and were interested only in seeing themselves on stage, however satirical the portrait. Thus came about the bawdy comedy of manners, heavily influenced by Molière but chilled with the dry wit of the London aristocracy. Romance and feeling gave way to intellect in sophisticated plays about cuckoldry, gossip, intrigue, and sexual license, yet tempered with a strong sense of decorum. Although most dramatists of the time did not consider themselves professional writers, Sir George Etherege and William Wycherley developed an elegant style of prose drama that was refined by Sir John Vanbrugh and later William Congreve, whose Way of the World (1700) is the finest example of Restoration comedy. At the beginning of the 18th century there was a softening of cynicism in the comedies of George Farquhar, which brought the period to a close.

As the late 17th century was not a heroic age, tragedy fared less well in England. The poet John Dryden tried unsuccessfully to combine the merits of Racine and Shakespeare in a genre of rhymed heroic tragedy. His blank-verse tragedy All for Love (1677) was more lasting. The weakness of Restoration theatre was that, by concentrating on its aristocratic audience, it excluded most of the populace and was therefore not representative of the various levels of English society. Not surprisingly, the theatre was always struggling to survive, and after the 1670s audiences dwindled. In 1682 the King’s Players and the Duke’s Players merged to form the United Company, and for 13 years London supported only one theatre.

The rise of a middle-class theatreThe 18th century theatre

A general decline in the level of playwriting during the 18th century was offset in large part by the emergence of some excellent actors and the building of hundreds of theatres throughout Europe. A new audience also emerged at this time. Inflation and the studied carelessness of the aristocracy had left many noble families impoverished, while middle-class merchants and financiers prospered. Intermarriage became a necessity for the nobility and a means of increasing social status for the middle class, whose members constituted the greater part of the new theatregoing public. Eager to enjoy its hard-won privileges but at the same time unable to cultivate the same tastes as the nobility, the middle class demanded something less artificial and formal than the theatre of the late 17th century—something more realistic and genteel. This audience was not prepared to labour over aesthetic subtleties; it wanted sensation.

Middle-class drama

In France, there was no one to carry forward the genius of Racine, and Neoclassical tragedy gave way to the drame bourgeois of Denis Diderot, whose moralizing domestic plays made a heavy appeal to the emotions. Voltaire, however, managed to sustain the form of Racine while widening the content to include historical subjects, sometimes exploiting the exoticism of Eastern settings in plays such as Zaïre (1732). Voltaire was fortunate to have some of the greatest actors of the period appear in his plays, among them

Henri-Louis

Lekain. In England George Lillo made tragedy more domestic by using middle-class characters in The London Merchant (1731). His example was followed in Germany by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in Miss Sara Sampson (1755), an attempt to shake off French Neoclassical influence and produce a truly German genre—the bürgerliches Trauerspiel (“middle-class tragedy”). A similar attempt to be rid of the delicacy of Racine came from the Italian dramatist Count Vittorio Alfieri. In plays such as Oreste (1778), he went back to the Greeks for inspiration, filling the old stories with strong passions.

A more accessible genre for conveying high tragic sentiment was the opera. Kings and princes in nearly every European country built court theatres to house it, and when the composition of the audience widened, huge opera houses were constructed. Milan’s

Teatro alla

La Scala (1778), for example, seated more than 2,000 people. Notwithstanding national variations—Henry Purcell and George Frideric Handel in England, Christoph Willibald Gluck and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the Germanic countries—opera remained essentially Italian. The Galli da Bibiena family of Bologna reigned as the supreme masters of scenic design, exerting influence throughout Europe. The family’s most famous innovation was the scena per angola, in which the lines of perspective seem to move to vanishing points on either side of the scene rather than in the centre of the scene. The comic side of opera was expressed in the French opéra-comique and the Italian opera buffa, in which there was more balance between the music and the libretto. This was particularly the case in the popular English ballad opera, which was more like a play with songs. The best-known example of English ballad opera is John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (1728).

Smaller playhouses also abounded to accommodate the growing number of plays. At the beginning of the century, Paris had three theatres, but by 1791 there were 51. The growth of playhouses in London was discouraged by the Licensing Act of 1737, which gave the lord chamberlain extensive powers to censor all plays and to uphold the monopoly of the two patent theatres in London. Theatre managers, however, found a way around this by filling out their programs with musical items. (Similar laws in Paris were evaded by unlicensed actors who played in forains, the illegal theatres of the fairgrounds.) Outside London, the spread of theatres royal in provincial towns gave new importance to the touring circuits, which became valuable training grounds for young actors. It was in this way that the century’s greatest actor, David Garrick, gained his early experience. In both tragedy and comedy, Garrick developed a more

natural

convincing style of acting that became widely influential. As manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, he introduced concealed stage lighting and stopped the practice of spectators sitting on the stage. (Voltaire did the same in France.) It is interesting to note that, at

a

the time

when

Garrick was buried in Westminster Abbey, French actors, under penalty of excommunication, still had to be buried in unconsecrated ground.

Some of the most important dramatic contributions in the 18th century were in the field of comedy. Dominated at first by the tearful comedies of Colley Cibber and Sir Richard Steele in England and the comédie larmoyante of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée in France, the form

spluttered

came to life as a reaction against sentimental drama. Oliver Goldsmith evoked the Elizabethan mood and signaled a return to hearty laughter in She Stoops to Conquer (1773); Richard Brinsley Sheridan tried to revive the comedy of manners in The School for Scandal (1777).

In France and Italy, the most interesting developments were literary applications of the commedia dell’arte. Banished by Louis XIV, the Italian actors were back in 1716 under the name Comédie-Italienne. This time they softened their style to suit prevailing taste and found a sympathetic writer in Pierre Marivaux, who developed a more refined expression of the commedia dell’arte spirit. In Italy, where the commedia dell’arte was already becoming lifeless, two rival playwrights, Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi, tried to reform it in different ways. Goldoni replaced the improvised dialogue with fully written texts, and, although he achieved popularity with Il servitore di due padrone (c. 1745; The Servant of Two Masters), he faced bitter opposition from the profession. Gozzi, on the other hand, allowed his actors plenty of opportunity for improvisation. He mixed fairy-tale fantasy and realism in a type of play he called fiabe, the best-known example being L’amore delle tre melarance (1761; The Love

for

of Three Oranges). Comedy reached an exuberant peak in two plays by the French dramatist Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais: Le Barbier de Séville (1775; The Barber of Seville) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784; The Marriage of Figaro).

A curious offshoot of the commedia dell’arte in England was introduced in 1717 by the actor John Rich. Under the stage name of Lun, he played Harlequin in a new form he called pantomime. The entertainment began with a familiar story or

classical

Classical legend in verse, then the characters were transformed into commedia dell’arte figures for the harlequinade in which their tricks and adventures were mimed to music. Rich produced a pantomime annually until 1760. The form continued after him and became even more popular in the 19th century.

Beginnings The beginnings of American theatre

The strongly Puritan sentiments of settlers in North America prohibited the development of theatre until the early 18th century, when a number of English actors arrived in the South and began staging plays in temporary venues. The first theatres were built in Williamsburg, Va. (c. 1716), and Charleston, S.C. (1730). By the mid-1730s a number of theatres had opened in New York, and in 1752 the first visiting company from London performed in Williamsburg

in 1752. In the absence of any local dramatists, the repertoire in America consisted mainly of successes from the London stage. After

.

Although there was no lack of enthusiasm for developing an indigenous American theatre at the end of the 18th century, the plays written and produced during that period proved lifeless and derivative, often little more than adaptations of English successes. Thomas Godfrey’s Neoclassical tragedy The Prince of Parthia (1767) is often considered the first play by an American, but recognizably American characters did not appear on stage until Royall Tyler’s The Contrast (1787), the first American comedy. Tyler’s play introduced a favourite theme of early American drama: the triumph of native honesty and worth over foreign sham and affectation.

Before and after independence (1782), several

of the new states tried

legislatures in New England tried on moral grounds to prohibit theatrical performances

on moral grounds

. To combat this, one touring company announced its presentation of Shakespeare’s Othello as “a moral dialogue in five acts.” By the end of the century, however, professional theatre was well established and such groups as the American Company were giving regular seasons.

The Romantic 19th-century theatre

The last decades of the 18th century were characterized by a

breakaway

break from the cool reason of Neoclassicism and an urge to reassert freedom and national consciousness. The French and American revolutions were the most notable consequences of this, but there were stirrings throughout Europe. The theatre became an important means of arousing patriotic fervour, a function that was to continue well into the 19th century. At the same time, the theatre doors were opened to the lower classes, who swelled the audience and imposed their own tastes

on the theatre

. More and more playhouses were built to accommodate the demand.

The Romantic theatre

A spirit of Romanticism swept through all the arts. In the theatre, formalized rules were cast aside to allow for much more individualistic and passionate expression. The emphasis on detail, as opposed to the Neoclassical preoccupation with the general and representative, led toward naturalism on the one hand and a drama of the subjective imagination on the other. Almost every major poet turned his hand to writing plays. The source of inspiration for them all was Shakespeare, who enjoyed a new wave of appreciation in numerous translations and productions all over Europe.

The English poets, among them Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, failed in their attempts to create a drama that suited prevailing tastes, partly because they were not prepared to descend to a level that they considered vulgar and partly because they were overshadowed by the weight of their own England’s dramatic heritage, having very little to add to it. By contrast, the influence of Shakespeare in Germany proved liberating. The breakaway from French Neoclassical drama, which had been heralded by Lessing in the 1760s, found full expression in the Sturm und Drang (Storm “Storm and StressStress”) movement that began with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tempestuous first play, Götz von Berlichingen (1773; Eng. trans., Götz von Berlichingen). Its medieval theme led to a wave of historical writing and “gothicism” (a preoccupation with an idealized and melodramatic past that later became especially popular in England) and with it a new interest in the visual aspects of theatre production. The greatest exponent of the genre was Friedrich von Schiller, whose first play, Die Räuber (1781; The Robbers), left audiences stunned. Goethe and Schiller were both involved with the court theatre at Weimar. When Goethe, as director of the theatre, saw that the Sturm und Drang movement was leading to excess and absurdity, he reverted to a more Classical style of theatre. Heinrich von Kleist, best known for his play Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (1821; The Prince of Homburg), is was considered by some the only dramatist of real merit at the time.

Melodrama

The reduction of Schiller’s poetic style of Romanticism to a level of popular entertainment for unsophisticated audiences resulted in the melodrama that, in Melodrama arose from two factors: the popularization of Romanticism and the Gothic; and the evasion of the restrictive licensing laws of England and France. In spite of its lack of literary merit, melodrama became one of the most popular forms dramatic form of the 19th century. For example, August von Kotzebue, whose work Goethe was reluctantly forced to stage at Weimar, wrote more than 200 melodramas and exerted an enormous influence in England and France. The French dramatist Guilbert de Pixérécourt also enjoyed wide popularity. His play Coelina; ou, ou l’enfant du mystère (1800) was translated into English (without acknowledgement) by Thomas Holcroft as A Tale of Mystery and became in 1802 became the very first melodrama to be seen in England.

Both Kotzebue and Pixérécourt used a great variety of subjects with historical and exotic locations. They took every opportunity to incorporate sensational or terrifying effects, such effects—such as floods, fires, and earthquakes, and earthquakes—and made use of live animals on stage. In their works, characters tended to be stock types and words became character development is secondary to lively action. Much of the dialogue was accompanied by incidental music in an effort to heighten emotional impact. Even the best actors of the day, including John Philip Kemble and his sister Sarah Siddons, were compelled to appear in melodramas as an alternative to Shakespeare.

The early 19th century

While Shakespearean tragedy remained the main inspiration for serious Romantic drama in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and the Scandinavian countries during the early 19th century, little few works of true merit was were produced. After the French Revolution had settled, Napoleon reconstituted the Comédie-Française in 1799 under the actor François-Joseph Talma, who introduced many reforms and encouraged a less declamatory style of speech. In England, after a triumphant debut at Drury Lane in 1814 as Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Edmund Kean went on to become the greatest actor of the age, specializing in classic villain roles.

The most influential contributions, however, were in the field of popular theatre. Joseph Grimaldi created the much loved clown character in the harlequinade section of the English pantomime, appearing annually at Covent Garden until his retirement in 1823. At about this same time, Jean-Gaspard Deburau rekindled interest in the art of mime through his portrayals of the white-faced Pierrot at the Théâtre des Funambules in Paris. Both men became living legends.

A strain of fantastic comedy, influenced by Gozzi in its juxtaposition of the fairy-tale world and reality, was developed in Germany and Austria in the plays of Johann Nestroy and Ferdinand Raimund. In England this found expression in the extravaganza (similar in spirit to the pantomime) mainly through the fairy plays of J.R. Planché. His example was followed later in the century by Sir W.S. Gilbert, who became famous for the satirical operettas he wrote with Sir Arthur Sullivan, notable among which was Iolanthe (1882). The English burlesque (a more satirical version of the extravaganza) and the burletta (a farce with songs) were also popular forms of the time, as was their French counterpart, the vaudeville, which paved the way for the operetta.

Rise in the number of theatres

A sharp increase in the number of theatre buildings matched the rapid growth in urban development. During the London winter season of 1807, for example, only 10 theatres were operating; by 1870 there were 30. Drury Lane was rebuilt on a huge scale in 1794, designed to seat 3,600 people. This made audiences difficult for actors to control, and naturalistic subtle acting became almost impossible. Most of the new theatres, however, were much smaller.

In 1803 London’s Lyceum Theatre substituted gas for candles and oil lamps as a source of outdoor illumination, and in the next decade other theatres were quick to follow followed suit indoors. This meant that the brightness of light on stage could be controlled to a degree never before known. The disadvantages, however, Initially, the disadvantages were an appalling smell and a greatly increased danger of fire from the naked jets of flame. The advantage was that the brightness of onstage light could be controlled to a degree never before known. Faced with the prospect of a much wider theatregoing public, theatres became more specialized, catering to particular classes and their corresponding tastes. For middle-class audiences, changes in the auditoriums of European public theatres brought about greater comfort and respectability, with the result that spectators became quieter during the performance. In England, for example, soft seats were installed in the pit by the late 1820s. Galleries with their open boxes were divided into closed boxes near the proscenium arch, allowing for privacy, with the rest of the gallery open and known as the “dress circle.” For the poorer sections of the English populace, there were the small “penny theatres” (of which more than 80 existed in London during the 1830s), where patrons paid a penny to see short, crudely mounted productions. Some individuals began to exploit their special talents as singers, dancers, mimics, and jugglers, giving solo performances in ale houses and taverns. These forms of entertainment became so popular that a great chain of provincial and metropolitan theatres sprang up from the music room annex of the public saloon during the second half of the 19th century. In England these forms came to be known as music halland , in the United States as vaudeville, and in France as cafés chantants.

Romantic realism

The visit to Paris of an English Shakespearean company in 1827 had an immediate effect on French drama and acting techniques, inspiring Victor Hugo to write Hernani (1830), which signaled the beginning of a more distinctly literary Romanticism in France. Although this play eventually put an end to Neoclassicism, its first performance caused riots in the Comédie-Française. Historical dramas with a strong nationalist spirit began appearing in nearly every country, finding particularly stirring expression in the opera. In Germany Richard Wagner worked to create a more unified presentation of poetry, music, dance, and scenery in historical and mythic operas such as Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868; The Mastersingers of Nuremburg), culminating in the first full production of the mighty Ring des Nibelungen (1869–76; The Ring of the Nibelungen) in the specially constructed Bayreuth Festspielhaus. This theatre, which departed from the Baroque opera house, set a pattern of theatre production that is still followed today: its fan-shaped auditorium was the first to be darkened during the performance to encourage the sharpest concentration on what was happening on stage. Opera of a different style reached a peak in Italy through the works of Guiseppe Verdi.

The main trend in Europe around the middle of the century was toward Romantic realism and the development of a theatre of ideas. It was at this time that the Russian theatre began to take on new life in Nikolay Gogol’s biting satire Revizor (1836; The Inspector General) and with more delicate comic realism in the plays of Aleksandr Nikolayevich Ostrovsky and Ivan Turgenev. Edward George Bulwer-Lytton wrote one of the first English plays on a contemporary theme (Money [1840]), and the Irish-born writer and actor Dion Boucicault, best known for London Assurance (1841), had great success in both London and New York City with his melodramas. It was Boucicault who helped to establish author’s copyright in the United States (1856) after he became the first dramatist in Britain to receive a royalty payment for his plays. Lord Lytton gave his name to the Act of 1833, which established author’s performance copyright in England.

Eugène Scribe dominated the French stage with his 400 “well-made plays”; plays,” through which he developed a formula for creating highly commercial theatre wherein plot rather than character was the main concern. Eugène-Marin Labiche carried such techniques into farce, and another Scribe disciple, Victorien Sardou, became the leading French dramatist of the second half of the century. In spite of the shallowness of his plays, Sardou provided some memorable roles for the great French actress Sarah Bernhardt. A more serious type of drama, developed by Alexandre Dumas fils, was the thesis problem play (also sometimes called problem a thesis play), in which social problems were debated.

The actor-manager

If contemporary plays were of a poor standard, the deficiency was partly hidden by flamboyant productions and bravura performances by star actors, many of whom managed their own companies. The 19th century was the heyday of the actor-manager . Starsystem: star, licensee of the theatre, and arranger of the performance, he dominated the forestage while his fellow actors were relegated to the background as a sort of mobile dressingthe actor-manager dominated every aspect of a play’s production.

Although the actor-managers often chose plays for good acting parts rather than for their dramatic value, they introduced many reforms. In England William Charles Macready, one of the great tragedians of the century, was among the first to introduce full rehearsals for his company. After the monopoly of the patent theatres was removed in 1843, Samuel Phelps staged nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays at Sadler’s Wells, including many of the lesser-known ones. The greatest actor-manager was Sir Henry Irving, who first made his name in a melodrama by Leopold Lewis called The Bells (1871). Although he devoted much time to touring, the Lyceum became London’s principal theatre under his management. Irving also helped to raise the status of actors, becoming in 1895 the first English actor to be knighted.

Because of the technical difficulties of manipulating complicated scenic effects (e.g., storms, forest fires, and earthquakes), the star actor was eventually obliged to hand over artistic control to a neutral observer, the stage manager, who could coordinate all aspects of the production. Thus the stage manager’s function became increasingly important until he was eventually elevated to the status of régisseur, or directorCharles Kean in England and George II, duke of Saxe-Meiningen, in Germany were among those who, by coordinating spectacular visuals and ensemble acting, pioneered the function of the régisseur (known as the producer in England and the director in America).

Movement toward realism

The Romantic movement at the beginning of the 19th century had stimulated an interest in historical plays, which in turn gave rise to an almost obsessive preoccupation with authentic settings and costumes.

In England

Charles Kean’s productions of Shakespeare crowded so much archaeological detail onto the stage that new scenes were often invented to make full use of the designer’s research. In Kean’s production of Hamlet in 1858, for instance, the recurring stage direction “a room in the castle” was represented by at least four different settings. Needless to say, this did incalculable damage to both the pace and fluidity of the play. In such impressive surroundings crowd scenes reached new peaks of popularity and spectacle. Large numbers of exotic animals were also used whenever an excuse could be found. One of the most sensational effects, however, was the “racing drama” in which live horses galloped on moving belts set into the stage floor. In this way, the chariot race of William Young’s Ben Hur could be staged in New York City in 1899. Realism found its way into domestic dramas, too, one of the earliest innovations being the box set that replaced the perspective backcloth and wings depiction of a room with three solid walls and a ceiling. This feature was introduced to the English stage in 1832 by the actress

and singer

-manager Madame Vestris at the Olympic Theatre.

A move toward ensemble acting was perhaps the logical continuation of efforts to achieve scenic realism. Madame Vestris demanded a more natural style of playing from her actors, and her example was followed by Charles Kean in his handling of crowd scenes: the extras were divided into small groups, each led by an experienced actor. But the most decisive move toward ensemble playing under the guidance of a modern theatre director was made by George II, duke of Saxe-Meiningen. The

Duke

duke was influenced by the stagings of Kean, which he had seen on visits to London. Assisted by the actor Ludwig Chronegk, he assumed control of his state theatre company as director and designer in 1866 and achieved an unrivaled harmony and discipline of playing. The company’s extensive European tours between 1874 and 1890 had a considerable impact on actors and actor-managers. On the level of domestic drama, an attempt at contemporary realism was made by the English dramatist T.W. Robertson in the 1860s in both the writing and production of his plays. The style came to be known as “cup-and-saucer” drama because of the

meals that were eaten on stage

thoroughness of the stage props’ accuracy.

The introduction of electricity in theatres allowed for much brighter lighting on stage, providing yet another reason for eliminating exaggerated acting. The first experiments with electric stage lighting were at the Paris Opéra in 1846, but full systems were not installed until about 1880. In England the first use of electric stage lighting was in 1881 at the Savoy Theatre.

The

advances in stage production eventually

artistic specialization brought about by a competitive marketplace helped to stimulate a higher level of drama. The tradition of the French

“well

well-made

play”

play was carried forward in England on a more serious note in Sir Arthur Wing Pinero’s Second Mrs. Tanqueray (1893) and with a brilliance of wit that evoked the Restoration comedy of manners in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

The full impact of realist drama in the final decades of the 19th century came from northern Europe, first in the plays of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen and later in the work of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Together, though in different ways, they exerted a strong influence on the course of acting and writing that has lasted to the present day. Ibsen achieved international recognition through his verse dramas, Brand (1865; Eng. trans., Brand) and Peer Gynt (1867; Eng. trans., Peer Gynt), though his reputation rests mainly on the realistic contemporary plays that set out to expose social evils. Samfundets støtter (1877; Pillars of Society), Et dukkehjem (1879; A Doll’s House), and Hedda Gabler (1890; Eng. trans., Hedda Gabler) are among the best known of such works.

Naturalism

As early as 1867, the French novelist Émile Zola had called for a rejection of all artifice in the theatrical arts, as in the novel, demanding that plays be faithful records of behaviour—namely, scientific analyses of life. Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, an 1873 dramatization of his own novel (written in 1867), represents the first consciously Naturalistic naturalistic drama.

Zola’s “slice-of-life” technique found fuller expression in Sweden in August Strindberg’s Fröken Julie (1888; Miss Julie), which heralded a new generation of writers whose plays dealt with themes centring on real contemporary society, treated in action and dialogue that looked and sounded like everyday behaviour and speech. These writers included Gerhart Hauptmann in Germany, Henry-François Becque in France, and Maxim Maksim Gorky in Russia. Partly because their these plays often dealt with the gloomier side of life, audiences for them were at first small. In spite of the lack of commercial success, sympathetic productions were made possible by a number of independent “free” theatres that appeared throughout Europe.

Théâtre-Libre

In 1887 André Antoine, an enthusiastic amateur actor, formed a small company in Paris, which he called Théâtre-Libre (“Free Theatre”). His intention was to provide a showcase theatre for young playwrights of the new Naturalistic naturalistic drama, from both France and abroad, who could find no other opportunity of bringing their work before the public. Antoine’s first production was a group of one-act plays that attracted the attention of leading avant-garde theatre intellectuals such as Zola and Becque. The following year, Leo Tolstoy’s Vlast tmy (1888; The Power of Darkness) was presented, and Théâtre-Libre took on an international significance. Apart from the work of such French writers as Becque and Eugène Brieux, Théâtre-Libre also introduced the plays of Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann, and the Norwegian Bjørnstjerne Martinius Bjørnson. Because of financial difficulties, the theatre closed in 1896, but by then it had already exerted an enormous influence on playwriting, directiondirecting, and actingand had helped to liberate French theatre from the artificiality in which it had been steeped. Antoine encouraged his actors to behave as if they were unaware of the presence of the audience, while his settings aimed to achieve in meticulous detail the impression of real life. He became famous for hanging real using real objects in his stage settings, including carcasses of meat in the stage setting of for a butcher’s shop.

Freie Bühne

Disturbed by the stagnation of theatre in Germany during the 1880s, young intellectuals there tried to promote the revolutionary Naturalistic naturalistic drama by opening the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, but they soon ran into trouble with the censors. In 1889 , a group of writers headed by the theatre critic Otto Brahm formed a private theatre club called the Freie Bühne after Antoine’s Théâtre-Libre. Its earliest productions were of Ibsen’s Gengangere (1885; Ghosts) and Hauptmann’s first play, Vor Sonnenaufgang (1889; Before Dawn), and it also staged the latter’s better-known Weber (1892; The Weavers). When Brahm became director of the Deutsches Theater in 1894, the Freie Bühne was attached to it as an experimental division, though by this time the new drama was being accepted throughout Germany in similar theatres dedicated to bringing serious plays to the working class at reasonable prices. Other so-called free theatres in Berlin were the Freie Volksbühne (“Free People’s Theatre”) and the Schiller Theater.

The independent theatre

Dissatisfaction with established systems of theatre, including the all-powerful often egocentric actor-manager and the indulgence in scenic spectacle, also existed in England. Critics had long deplored the lack of worthwhile modern English drama, and toward the end of the century William Archer was one of many writers who called for an equivalent of the Théâtre-Libre that would bring the “theatre of ideas” to England. Inspired by Antoine’s example, Jacob Jack Thomas Grein, a Dutchman living in England, organized the Independent Theatre Club. The theatre opened in 1891 with Archer’s translation of Ibsen’s Gengangere, provoking a storm of moral fury. One champion of the new group and its policies was the theatre critic George Bernard Shaw; his first play, Widower’s House (1892), which dealt with the subject of slum landlordism, was produced there the following year. The theatre was supported by a small group of subscribers, many of them distinguished writers. Although it ceased activity in 1897, the Independent Theatre Club prepared the way for the Stage Society, founded in 1899. For the next 40 years the society arranged private Sunday performances of experimental plays at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

Moscow Art Theatre

The movement toward Naturalism naturalism that was sweeping Europe reached its highest artistic peak in Russia in 1898 with the formation of the Moscow Art Theatre (later called the Moscow Academy Art Theatre). Its name became synonymous with that of Anton Chekhov, whose plays about the day-to-day life of the landed gentry achieved a delicate poetic realism that was years ahead of its time. Konstantin Stanislavsky , its director, became the 20th century’s most influential theorist on acting. In the early 19th century Russian theatre had been one of the most backward in Europe, content to play a repertoire of stock theatrical pieces, mainly French comedies and farces, or Russian imitations of them. Little time was spent on rehearsal; the plays were so similar that the same performances and sets could be used time and again. However, the Meiningen Company, which had visited Russia during the late 1880s, had pointed the way to reform with its exemplary discipline.

During a 17-hour conversation in a Moscow restaurant, Konstantin Stanislavsky, an amateur actor of considerable experience, and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, a playwright, teacher, and drama critic, talked over their vision of an ideal theatre company, its artistic policy, and its production methods. On the basis of their discussion, they formed a group they called the Moscow Art Theatre Company. No great stir was made until, later that year, they revived Anton Chekhov’s Chayka (1896; The Seagull), which had failed badly in its incompetent first production in St. Petersburg. An instant success, the new production established the reputation of both Chekhov and Stanislavsky. The intimacy and truthfulness of the acting were something entirely new. The theatre’s name became synonymous with that of Chekhov, whose plays about the day-to-day life of the landed gentry achieved a delicate poetic realism that was years ahead of its time. Through his stagings of several of Chekhov’s other plays, Dyadya Vanya (1897; Uncle Vanya), Tri sestry (1901; Three Sisters), and Vishnyovy sad (1904; The Cherry Orchard), Stanislavsky developed a style of infinitely detailed production, the result of long and methodical rehearsals, to achieve an almost perfect surface naturalism with great emotional complexity beneath.

The American theatre

Although there was no lack of enthusiasm in developing an indigenous American theatre at the end of the 18th century, the plays that appeared proved lifeless and derivative, often little more than adaptations of English successes. It was not until the early 20th century that actors had a chance to portray American characters in well-written roles that were comparable to those of the European theatre. The first play by a native American was Thomas Godfrey’s Neoclassical tragedy The Prince of Parthia (1767), but recognizable American characters did not appear on stage until Royall Tyler’s comedy The Contrast (1787). This work introduced a favourite theme of early American drama: the triumph of native honesty and worth over foreign sham and affectation.

The growth of American theatre

The growth of the early American theatre owed more to its actors than to its dramatists. In the early decades of the 19th century, the finest English actors, notably Edmund Kean, William Charles Macready, and Charles Kemble, visited the United States and provided a stimulus for the local actors with whom they worked

with

. Before long, the gesture was returned when such American actors as Edwin Booth, Edwin Forrest, and Charlotte Saunders Cushman appeared with some success on the London stage. Forrest, whose acting was characterized by muscular strength and great vocal power, was perhaps the first to popularize the virile outdoor image cultivated by many American actors ever since. His most famous role, Spartacus in Robert Bird’s Gladiator (1831), was specially written for him. The Booths were an eminent acting family: Junius Brutus Booth had acted with Edmund Kean, and his son Edwin with Irving, but they achieved notoriety when another son, John Wilkes Booth, assassinated Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

By the middle of the 19th century, the number of theatres in the United States had multiplied. Many of them were based on English models and offered a high standard of comfort and luxury. Detailed historical accuracy in setting and costume first attracted attention in Charles Kean’s visiting production of Shakespeare’s King John (1846)

, and the

. The new box settings (three solid walls to suggest a room instead of the traditional side wings and backcloth arrangement) began to be used in Edwin Booth’s theatre from 1869, after which realistic staging became increasingly popular. This trend was stimulated by the introduction of gas lighting about 1825 and of electric lighting about 1885.

Styles of acting also leaned increasingly toward realism as the century advanced. Joseph Jefferson, whose career spanned 71 years, was the leading comic actor of his day, best remembered in the title role of Dion Boucicault’s version of Rip Van Winkle in the 1860s. One of the great actress-managers was Louisa Lane Drew of Mrs. John

Drew

Drew’s Arch Street Theatre Company in Philadelphia, who was famed for her frequently revived portrayal of Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan’s Rivals.

Black

African American actors were rarely seen on the 19th-century stage

; Negro

except in segregated minstrel troupes and the short-lived African Grove Theatre in New York City. Black roles were instead usually played by white actors with black makeup,

giving rise to

and the result was often shallow and stereotyped portrayals. One of the first playwrights to treat the African American

Negro

seriously was Boucicault in The Octoroon (1859).

After a surfeit of melodrama, a more distinctly American style of drama began to evolve through the work of Bronson Howard, whose first play, Saratoga (1870), helped to make him the first to earn his living solely by playwriting.

As the population spread westward and southward, spurred by the gold rush and the expansion of the railways, so the demand for theatre became more widespread. In the South showboats on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers provided floating entertainment, mostly melodramas. Most of the leading actors of the time made visits to California, where the first theatres were built in the 1850s. Initially, star actors would work with local resident companies, but the majority of these were eventually overtaken by full touring productions that originated in New York City. By the 1870s, these companies were providing entertainment throughout the country. Booking agencies were formed to liaise between companies and theatres, and from this activity a group of theatre owners, producers, and agents formed the first Theatrical Syndicate in 1896. Although its original aim was to streamline the organization of entertainment and prevent exploitation, it soon gained a monopoly on theatre by controlling bookings in New York City and in key cities on the touring circuits. Because its blatant commercialism discouraged high artistic standards, the monopoly was fiercely resisted by the more innovative producer-directors such as David Belasco, who helped to introduce to the American stage the European fashion for scenic naturalism. Making use of the latest stage machinery, he devised many spectacular effects and used a real flock of sheep on stage in one production of a Passion play.

Popular entertainment

Alongside the developments in “legitimate” theatre, the last decades of the 19th century saw the rise of several forms of popular entertainment that often reached much larger audiences and created a new range of star performers. In these traditions lay the seeds of the 20th century’s most popular theatrical genre, the musical comedy.

One of the greatest showmen of the time was P.T. Barnum. Founder of the American

legend

notion of “show business,” he promoted melodrama, exhibited the midget Tom Thumb (Charles Stratton) in the United States and England, and finally merged with James A. Bailey in 1881 to form “The Greatest Show on Earth,” a three-ring circus, which was taken over in England by the Ringling Brothers after Barnum’s death. The American brand of spectacular entertainment achieved international fame through Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West shows, which featured a large cast of cowboys,

Indians

“Indians,” and animals, as well as the famous sharp-shooter Annie Oakley. Another form that enjoyed enormous popularity in the United States and England throughout most of the century was the minstrel show, inspired by Thomas Darthmouth Rice. The performers were at first white men with black makeup, though, later

Negroes

, African Americans appeared in the shows. Sitting in a semicircle and playing banjos, tambourines, bones, and fiddles, they sang comic songs and sentimental ballads interspersed with soft-shoe dances and snatches of

cross-fire

dialogue.

By the 1880s

,

the music hall was at the height of its popularity in England, with a proliferation of newly constructed halls all over London and in the main cities. As the audience widened from predominantly male working-class spectators to include middle-class men and women, the layout of the auditoriums changed. The old-style intimate halls with their drinking facilities and tables gave way to larger, more theatrelike buildings, one of the most luxurious of which was the London Pavilion. An evening’s bill could feature more than 20 different acts, including jugglers, acrobats, conjurers, ventriloquists, dancers, slapstick comedians, and singers ranging from vulgar to light classical. Two of the most famous performers of the 1880s were Marie Lloyd, who specialized in risqué songs, and the comedian Dan Leno, who, like many music-hall stars, made annual appearances in pantomime as well. Vesta Tilley, the male impersonator, created the character Burlington Bertie; Sir Harry Lauder was the finest Scottish comedian; Little Tich was famed for his short stature and elongated boots; Jules Léotard and Charles Blondin achieved international fame as acrobats; and Grock (original name Charles

Adrian

Adrien Wettach), the greatest clown after Grimaldi, played 20 instruments and delighted London audiences from 1903 until 1924.

By then, the music hall was in decline, unable to compete with the new forms of mass entertainment into which many of its performers were drifting—revue, musical comedy, cinema, radio, and, later, television.

There was a similar form of entertainment in France, while in the United States vaudeville retained many of the features and acts of the English music hall. It was first presented in New York City in 1881 as an attempt to provide “clean” entertainment for respectable family audiences. By 1920 the music hall was in decline, unable to compete with the new forms of mass entertainment into which many of its performers were drifting—revue, musical comedy, film, radio, and, later, television.

On a more sophisticated level, light opera was developing in Europe out of the German Singspiel and the French opéra-comique. Early examples were Jacques Offenbach’s classical burlesque, Orphée aux enfers (1858; Orpheus in the Underworld), Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus (1874; The Bat), and the satirical operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. These led to the romantic operettas of Victor Herbert in the United States and Franz Lehár in Austria. But it was Jerome Kern who in the early 20th century first developed a genuinely American sound from ballad and ragtime musical forms that helped to forge the particular identity of the American musical comedy.